Home > How the Patriots suddenly handled the Dolphins blitzing... and links!

How the Patriots suddenly handled the Dolphins blitzing... and links!

Ian Rapoport Monday, December 26, 2011

At the beginning of the game against the Dolphins, it was a mess. Tom Brady was getting harassed, more than at any point over the last three years, and the Patriots looked lost.

That helped lead to a 17-point deficit. The Dolphins blitzed on 10 of their first 13 plays and pummeled Brady and a makeshift offensive line.

Then, it all changed. Suddenly, they were protecting. Suddenly, the Dolphins were blitzing half as much. Suddenly, Brady was finding open space.

To find out what happened, I looked at the blitz patterns and broke down how the Dolphins attacked the Patriots and how the Pats adjusted. The result was my weekly feature, Subject to Review.

What I learned was that when the Patriots went to their no-backs, five-wideout look (but using two tight ends to do it), the Dolphins couldn't blitz as much or as effectively. They couldn't disguise. They couldn't get their blitzers on the field. And Brady was unloading it quickly.

So they kept hammering it. They went to their empty look for most of the second half and it paid off huge.

"I don’t think we go into every game thinking, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ " Brady said. "If it works, we stick with it. We tried it early – we tried it in the first half [and] it didn’t work very well, but based on our personnel we thought maybe we should just stick with it and we certainly executed a lot better."

Want a full break-down? Check out the coverage in today's Boston Herald:

-- This is my Subject to Review, looking at specifically how the Patriots handled the Dolphins pressure, eventually dictating it for them.

-- This is my massive graphic, where I broke out my calculator and figured some stuff out.

-- My notebook leads with DE Shaun Ellis, who is suddenly back in the mix.